If you are using a page layout program like PageMaker or Illustrator, you’ll want to turn kerning off. Kerning is how it controls letter spacing. To look like a typewriter you want your font to be monospaced, every letter gets the same amount of horizontal space. Turning off kerning will do that.

If you are just printing to the screen, just use the Courier font and it will look fab.

What makes Courier look like a mechanical typewriter is that it is a “constant width” font. This means that all the letters are the same width. “Variable width” fonts, like Times New Roman and Arial have letters that are different widths. You can see this on the screen right now – “W” is a lot bigger that “i”.

By the nature of their mechanics, old typewriters produce characters that are “fixed width” meaning that, for example an “i” is just as wide as a “w”. Stylistically, old typewriters used serif typefaces–that is, more classical characters whose strokes end with short, perpendicular lines, called serifs. There’s a number of fonts out there that emulate thier style, but the most common (and the one you most likely already have on your computer) is Courier.